The background: Jungle make world music for rundown inner cities. It's jungle evidently made by people who don't a) like jungle or b) live in the jungle, unless it's an urban one. Their debut double-A side, Platoon/Drops, is tribal in terms of rhythm but postpunk in sensibility. It is somehow texturally rich yet austere, with an atmosphere and a voice that suggest authority and gravitas despite the context of music designed essentially to make you have fun and dance. Platoon, the lead track, opens with a series of eerie sounds before giving way to a midtempo groove – and it is a groove, not a beat or a pulse. It's Studio 54 by way of Can's Inner Space Studio, New York electrofunk via Manchester and Cologne. The handclaps are disco and the bass-as-guitar is pure Peter Hook, but the timbre evokes a place somewhere to the left of Byrne/Eno's Bush of Ghosts. The tempo – loping, insistent – hints at hedonism (it's close to baggy bliss-out), only with an awareness that all pleasure is provisional.

Platoon is accompanied by a video of a six-year-old breakdancer called B-Girl Terra with viral potential – the video, not the dancer. No, the kid is fine, although we would recommend she has her head inspected after watching her spin on it so many times. The other track, Drops, starts off slower, with a lyric and an artificially tweaked falsetto that are less a pastiche of than an homage to 1970s conscious soul. It's music that reaches for the higher ground occupied by Curtis Mayfield and Stevie Wonder, drawing on that era's language of aspiration with religious overtones. There are soul tropes aplenty: "I've been lovin' you too long," is the most obvious – think Otis in space. Their remix of Beaty Heart's Seafood is more cosmic still, the singer's voice recalling Rudy Tambala of AR Kane – it's that enraptured and blissed-out. It's interesting to hear them let loose on another act's song, to test whether they're true auteurs able to transpose their aesthetic onto others. It also helps to isolate what are their signature sounds. Job done, then, because we have identified what they do and it is: create a mesmeric beat and surround it with subtly detailed sonics, adding vocals intimating hypnosis. In trance as mission, or something.

The buzz: "This single is the setting in motion of a hugely exciting new musician" – DIY.